Tip Jar

Investment in innovation in America is dropping. More researchers must spend more time seeking money. I also found a new toy, a government website: the United States International Trade Commission. Instead of just relying on unreliable news stories, it is always best to check out the official lies. Of course, every time one looks at the trade statistics and then visits all the free trade organizations that brought this catastrophe upon us, it makes the head spin.

The total grant money dedicated to the field has barely outpaced normal inflation over the last decade, but lab costs (especially salaries of students and fellows) have shot up at a much faster rate: grant buying power has declined by 15 percent as a result. Because of this, researchers are applying for more grants, sending the competition up and success rates down: overall funding rates have dropped from 38 percent to 22 percent. New investigators, who are generally thought to take more aggressive and innovative approaches, are faring even worse as their success rates have dropped by more than half and now stand at only 12 percent.

The net result is that the academic community is now devoting far more of its time to writing grants, a shift that has come at the expense of directing and publishing research. In the past, academics have had an escape route from the pressures to retain funding: the "blue sky" research labs run by major companies, such as AT&T's Bell Labs. But the report refers to these institutions as "once great," since recent years have seen them closed, sold off piecemeal, or refocused on product development.

Combined, these changes have caused US research output to shrink in comparison to the rest of the world. Based on publications in Physical Reviews B and E, the US contribution to papers has remained flat over the last decade, while papers originating from other countries have nearly doubled. The report predicts that this reduced output will ultimately exact a price on the American economy.

I knew inventors who worked for General Electric, Norton, IBM and Texas Instruments. I used to work for some of this organizations in the past. These great labs are now just a memory, the research was first farmed out to various universities and this is now gradually filtering away seeking lower wages and cheaper climes. The last time I worked for a research lab in the USA at RPI, only three researchers were Americans and only one graduate student was born in the USA. Most were from Eastern Europe or Asia. It was interesting to see how all of them were forced to use English but most of them, avid good readers, were poor speakers and the tendency was for the scientists of similar langage skills to hang out with each other. They all asked the Americans for help with their papers.

But the pipeline is now empty as far as our own pool is concerned. My father-in-law was a chemist who did research and has many inventions to his name and even 20 years ago, it was noticable that foreigners were being hired rather than Americans...because they were cheaper. Like a host of former American companies, it was sold to the French and is now run by outsiders and the American branch is no longer the head.

For a long while, there were many jobs in the computer field in research and development but the days when Americans born here dominated are gone. Nearly totally. My own family has been hit by all this. Changing majors, watching job possibilities vanish, others working for IBM ended up being go-betweens to China and then half of that was sold to China who moved the headquarters out of the Hudson Valley to a former slave state that has low taxes and cheap labor. On and on this goes, the only bits left are the military/industrial complex components.

And the policies of the US Federal Reserve is directly responsible for this:

The fiction that we are 'growing' our economy and that we are 'strong' is pure fiction. Proof is our inability to save, to fill our bank vaults, to spend on things that matter rather than on new ways for killing people. The Chinese keep needling us about this. We refuse to sell them the things we are developing yet we want them to buy from us but we manufacture little aside from weapons systems and of course, inappropriate gas guzzlers.

Every week I add a new government agency or commission to my 'Goverment statistics' folder. This latest one is always in the news in their futile, stupid efforts to fix our trade mess. Of course, their 'fixes' are bandaids on a gaping wound. We are like the Monty Python Black Knight in the Holy Grail: armless and soon, legless, we make threats, 'None shall pass' as Arthur contemptuously gallops on by.

The Japanese government enacted major amendments to its Pharmaceutical Affairs Law (PAL) in 2002 to reform its medical device regulatory approval system. These new changes to Japan's regulatory system came in response to pressures both from within and outside of Japan, including the U.S. government. The most significant goals of the reform were to improve efficiency and shorten product approval times. Despite some limited success in reducing product approval times in 2005 after these reforms took effect, significant challenges remain.

Medical device firms generally prefer the EU medical device approval system over the U.S. and Japanese approval systems, due to its shorter approval times. Although medical device regulation in the United States remains tightly controlled, it has become more predictable in recent years, and review times have steadily declined.

The U.S. medical device trade surplus declined steadily, from $5.9 billion in 2001 to $957 million in 2004, before rebounding modestly in 2005 to $1.8 billion. Despite steady growth in U.S. exports (which reached $25.5 billion in 2005), uninterrupted growth in U.S. demand and increased foreign outsourcing by U.S. firms contributed to the decline. Japan continued its historical trend of running a trade deficit in medical devices, while the EU maintained a trade surplus. Several multilateral and bilateral trade agreements have facilitated U.S. trade in medical devices, as they focus on issues of concern to the medical device industry, including the harmonization of medical device regulatory systems.

The United States, the EU, and Japan together account for about 90 percent of global production and consumption of medical devices. The U.S. medical device industry is the most competitive in the world, recognized for its ability to continually design, develop, and place innovative medical devices in U.S. and foreign markets. This can be attributed in part to a higher level of research and development investment and greater availability of venture capital, compared with the EU and Japanese industries. While both U.S. and EU firms produce a broad variety of medical devices, ranging from general hospital supplies to more advanced technology products, including advanced cardiovascular devices, Japanese firms are more narrowly focused on medical imaging devices and commodity hospital supplies.

The Japanese are famous for dragging their heels. They know, time is on their side so they never cooperate but instead, pass the yen and bow repeatedly, saying, 'Sorry, very sorry' and grinning to each other as we blunder about, wailing. They always have bottlenecks and archane rules and practices that cut off competitors for they are capitalists. They believe in restricting markets at home while flooding allies with their goods. And they are now very rich thanks to this philosophy. In addition, they have conned us into protecting them as they do this! What a scheme!

This commission has overseen this process for how many years? How about the last 30? Various players come in on the American team and the Japanese buy them off or these players come from Wall Street that makes money by colluding with the Asian and European traders who are reaming us out in international trade. Never is anyone who has no connections with the present system allowed to interface with this Commission. Occassionally, Congress will beg the corrupt commissioners who are working for foreign governments to please do something so it doesn't get worse and what happens?

IT GETS WORSE. Each quarter is worse than the previous and the negotiations and commissions roll onwards doing nothing useful since the trade gaps only widen faster! Since this is the case, all of this must be shut down and the WTO agreements and all treaties must be pulled out and re-negotiated with absolutely everyone all at the same time!

Instead, the opposite is happening and the only thing I can think is, greed has trumped patriotism and the lust to get rich means selling our souls and becoming slaves. How stupid is this?

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) today determined that revoking the existing antidumping duty order on clad steel plate from Japan would be likely to lead to continuation or recurrence of material injury within a reasonably foreseeable time.

As a result of the Commission's affirmative determination and the Department of Commerce's recent affirmative finding, the existing order on imports of this product from Japan will remain in place.

They talk about Japanese dumping of steel while ignoring the true bleeding which is the steel CARS pouring in, the super-value-added stuff! Toyota is 1,000X more destructive! And our own industries are in trouble because they can only make profits off of gas guzzlers that are very big and very expensive. And this is driving up our trade deficit due to the high cost of oil we import and the dying dollar vis a vis the euro is driving up oil prices for us, there has been little oil inflation for THEM, and on top of all this, the cheap yen is driving trade with the USA and it is weakening us economically and all this rests on Japan's sub 1% loans!

The International Trade Commission should focus on that! And indeed, Congress begged them to do exactly that.

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC or Commission) today announced that it has launched the first of three investigations that collectively will provide an in-depth assessment of the U.S.-China trade and investment relationship and the U.S.-Asia-Pacific trade and investment relationship.

The three investigations were requested by the Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives, in a letter received on October 2, 2006. In requesting the investigations, the Committee noted that there has been extensive debate about the causes of the recent growth in U.S.-China trade, particularly exports from China, and the extent to which this growth is driven by market forces or by Chinese domestic policies.

The ITC, an independent, nonpartisan, factfinding federal agency, will produce three reports for the Committee over the next 24 months. As requested, each report will focus on specific aspects of the U.S.-China trade relationship, including trends and patterns in trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) between the United States and Asian and Pacific trading partners (first report), the driving factors behind the rapid growth in U.S.-China trade (second report), and China's integration with the global economy through processing trade and foreign direct investment (third report).

The ITC will deliver its first report in the series to the Committee by October 2, 2007. The agency will launch the second investigation in April 2007 and the third investigation in October 2007; details regarding those investigations will be announced at the time they are initiated.

So, on my 57th birthday after 35 years of continuous, growing trade deficits that soared from $10 billion in 1978, is now at a spectacular $890 billion and rising! So these goof-balls will look at the data I publish every day. And they will scratch their bald heads and wonder what to do! Since the obvious cure is forbidden, they will come up with a package of bandaids that will infuriate the people bankrutpting us and they will retaliate by squeezing our balls in the bond markets.

Since this is the end result, it means we will continue as we are. I see no political moves to stop this outside of Nader's quixotic campaigns. The faith in the Free Trade system is growing, not shrinking! Isn't that amazing?

One of my first entries on this news site was to talk about Boeing and the Chinese and Japanese plans to move Boeing construction piece by piece to their homelands. The bulk of our trade of manufactured goods is in Boeing jets or military systems. There is little else. And note how, each year, more and more Boeing work is being relocated in our rival's lands! Boeing doesn't have to invest a penny or a yen in this! The Japanese...and the Chinese will cheerfully pay for everything. We just give them the blueprints and then teach them how to do all this and then relocate Boeing's development teams to Tokyo and Beijing and voila!

Outsourcing of services, in both directions, adds to the possibilities of unequalising trade. The skill-intensive pieces of production processes that mainly take place in the third world are often now located in the OECD – for example, Lenovo, the Chinese computer company, has its executive headquarters in North Carolina.

What all this comes down to is that it’s no longer safe to assert, as we could a dozen years ago, that the effects of trade on income distribution in wealthy countries are fairly minor. There’s now a good case that they are quite big, and getting bigger.

This doesn’t mean that I’m endorsing protectionism. It does mean that free-traders need better answers to the anxieties of those who are likely to end up on the losing side from globalisation.

The owners of the NYT probably warned Krugman to support 'free trade' or he would be dumped. So he joins the fool's chorus and squeaks that he doesn't want a realistic solution. He just wants to tell us we are going to follow this path no matter what.

What is his solution? Nothing! No one running this mess, no famous person dares to say, 'We MUST have protectionism!' Nor will they suggest rationing gasoline so SUV users will have to chang their wretched gluttony. No extra taxes on those schemes that are wrecking our nation, no gas taxes, nothing will be done that will 'hurt' us.

But we WILL BE HURT. The plan of the Chinese is to hurt us a lot. The plan of the Japanese is to dominate us and pay us back for WWII. The Europeans simply want to be the imperial rulers of the planet! Everyone has plans that are not good for us and we have a right to begin moving in a new direction, it is life and death!

The Chinese slavery story is making the rounds with little analysis or thinking about slavery in general. In the USA, people have been and are being enslaved: illegal aliens. In China, the vast excess of labor encourages attempts at exploitation. In the rich oil kingdoms, there are many literal slaves, the push to free the child jockeys came only from Europe, it was barely mentioned in the USA. And then there is a typical story about Chinese slaves from our own dark past, one that few Americans know or want to remember.

China has pledged to bring to justice traffickers who enslaved hundreds of children and adults to work in brick kilns in two provinces.

As it prepared to send investigators to Henan and Shanxi, the government said that all captives would be freed.

Some 550 people have been liberated in recent weeks and families believe up to 1,000 children were enslaved.

The story made national headlines after parents of some of them launched an internet campaign for their freedom.

The history of slavery is very interesting and focusing on the enslavement of Africans loses sight of the fact that slavery has along history going back to the beginnings of human society. Early human warfare was concerned with capture of women, eating other humans and pushing other families out of desired hunting and then farming areas. The desire to make people work for free and to be able to beat them so they work is very strong.

The colonization of the USA would have gone much slower if it wasn't for slavery. The wealth of Europe that could then suddenly spend much more on military technology so they could invade Asia, was based 100% on the enslavement and looting of both African and New World stone age peoples. The decimination of the New World as the slavers from Europe worked the natives to death, the endless demands for gold, silver and farm products coupled with diseases and starvation destroyed 90% of the population, an astonishing number.

The natives of nearly all the Caribbean islands were annihilated and African slaves were kidnapped and shipped by the millions to work the now deserted islands producing indigo and sugar. The deaths of these slaves during the first 100 years was so ferocious, the need to import more was an ongoing enterprise. Once that shameful business was terminated, the condition of the slaves improved slightly because there was some small incentive to keep them alive, barely.

The Irish and Scots made bad slaves for the British slavers but to control them politically and to cement the power of the British slave state, the Crown would deport, chase out or displace huge populations of peasants not only in Ireland and Scotland but inside the Kingdom itself. After the Great Plagues of the 14th to 16th centuries, there was a period when there weren't enough peasants but as that faded, the peasant population was too high to control politically, indeed, much of Australlia and the USA were populated by quasi-slaves shipped over in chains or forced to go by other means. These people also suffered the whip and loss of liberty that the Africans endured only unlike them, there was a means towards ending enslavement.

Heng Tinghan, who trafficked the 31 slave laborers to the kiln in Hongtong county, was formally arrested along with four accomplices on Monday on charges of illegal detention and mayhem, Xinhua news agency said.

Police have detained the supervisor, but Xinhua did not say if he was one of the five receiving the arrest warrants on Monday as well. Another three are wanted, Xinhua said.

The scandal has emboldened local media to bluntly demand answers from the usually unassailable ruling Communist Party and to demand official heads roll.

The communist party is a dictatorial organization which is somewhat more unrepresentative than the US system and just as corrupt. Getting them to investigate themselves is very difficult but not impossible. In the USA, we investigate each other in a limited degree but note how, after it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and thus, our invasion was totally illegal, not one soul who lied us into that war has been arrested and put on trial.

So the finger pointing and the sneering is badly misplaced. Until the USA turns and faces its own crimes, we cannot wear the mantle of legitimacy. The Jews who invaded Palestine have successfully demanded and recieved huge funds that are not charity nor aid, to pay for the enslavement of the Jewish population of Europe by the Nazi Germans.

But no one in Europe or America is paying reparations for the enslavement and looting of Africa. When China reached out to Africa recently, all the media in the former slave states of the West wailed and howled like banshees but the minute any African or former slave leaders asked for reparations if the West is so concerned about Africa being exploited by the Chinese, suddeenly the ears were plugged and the faces went blank.

Chen Liangyu was the top political figure in China's richest city, Shanghai.

Following his public sacking on Monday, he is now the most senior head to roll since President Hu Jintao took office in 2003.

Mr Chen is accused of being involved in multi-million dollar scandal, in which money from the city's social security fund was illegally invested in a road toll project and in Shanghai's wildly speculative property market.

The Chinese do go after high party officials and they are concerned about corruption. Just as in the USA, nearly all politicians have their hands in various tills, seeking wealth and power, it is the same in China. Pentagon appropriations are the main fountain of wealth as these people work with men and women who bribe them, to spend like crazy on hopelessly useless projects, schemes and invasions. Cleaning out DC is now a herculean task and I see no progress there at all.

Indeed, things are obviously getting much worse because everyone makes money on corruption and slavery and tapping into the giant pool of labor of China is a top priority of the men and women over here who want to be very rich off of value-added labor. If our ruling elites are so concerned about the enslavement of Asians they would be investigating themselves. They would be demanding strong unions in China and other innovations that we barely have here.

And then there is the flood of illegal aliens here who are semislaves. They pour into the USA with the connivance of our government because they have no rights and are easily controlled and their mass keeps wages down in many industries. If we could totally enslave them, our profit-seeking elites would be overjoyed.

From the above article:

A statement from the Communist Party's central committee said: "Whoever it is, no matter how high their positions are, anyone who violates Party rules or national law will be severely investigated and punished".

Party members can be sentenced to death for corruption, although senior figures often have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment or shorter sentences.

And how many politicians have we executed? I would suggest the Kennedys. But aside from them, has a politician ever gone to prison for more then 10 years for any ECONOMIC crimes? Let's look at the record for prison time for bribery: when was Reagan arrested for collecting $2.5 million from the Japanese a month after leaving the White House?

Last month while roaming the web seeking information about an earthquake, I came across this interesting story about American slavers and the Chinese:

The railroad management fretted over all delays in forward progress, including building the spur. Complete the road and then build the spurs, they ordered Totten. To their way of thinking, early completion was merely a matter of persistent work and flooding the project with laborers. The arrival of 360 more Irish in January 1854 was the beginning of that flood. By the end of February over 9,000 workers were busy on the 18-mile stretch between the Obispo River and Panama City. The dire warnings of the perils to be faced in Panama from climate and malignant disease issued by Vanderbilt and his colleagues dissuaded many Americans from coming, but other nationalities - Irish, Hindus, Chinese, English, French, Germans, Malays - responded to the call. Workers died in large numbers, but the railroad company did its best to discredit the notion that this death rate was in any way out of the ordinary. The company’s attitude inspired such statements in the Star & Herald as follows:

“As to all the nonsense about malaria, fever, pestilential swamps and the thousand other ills that are charged to the Isthmus, we report again, they exist no more than in any other tropical climate, and that prudence and ordinary precaution is all that is required on the part of unacclimated newcomers to our sunny shores.”

First of all, note how the American media was used to lie for the capitalists. As usual, the complicit criminal actions of the media owners in collusion with the people seeking to profit off of some venture is classic. Far from investigating the conditions of the workers and exposing the lies used by labor recruiters and showing the world how despicable this all was, the media was recruited to help these monsters get more workers to replace the ones who were dying at such a ferocious rate. Also note that the natives of the region ran off or refused to labor under these inhuman conditions.

The railroad owners should have been arrested and executed. Instead, they were celebrated as heroes. When the rails were built from California to the Midwest midcentury, the vast bulk of the dangerous work in the Sierras was done by semi-slave Chinese labor and every mile of every road and canal in the New World was lined by anonymous graves, unmarked and unremarked. To this day, not once cent of reparations have been paid to the families who lost sons and fathers in this fashion. On top of this, the survivors were deported and the workers were forbidden to bring over women of any kind for fear these semi-slaves might stay and have children.

From the railroad history:

Early on the morning of March 30, 1854, the sober, right- thinking Argonauts who chose to stroll on the sea wall at Panama City rather than spend their time in saloons and card rooms were rewarded for their virtue by the sight of the clipper Sea Witch entering the harbor. The Witch, owned by Howland and Aspinwall, was 192 feet long with towering masts and a black dragon as figurehead. Launched in 1846 for the China trade, by 1854 she was a famous ship. The Sea Witch was the first vessel to sail from New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn in less than 100 days. Twice she had broken the speed record from Canton to the United States, and neither of these passages has ever been equalled by a sailing ship.

Many of the sea wall strollers, eager to relieve their boredom, rowed out for a closer look at the beautiful vessel and thereby suffered disillusionment. The Witch was filthy and stank like a slaver. She had made the run from Canton to Panama with her holds packed with Chinese coolies. Soon she was joined in the harbor by two other sailing ships, equally filthy and odorous, also loaded with the Orientals.

The railroad company had purchased the services of the coolies from a Canton labor contractor under a system similar to that of the British indentured servants sent to Virginia and Georgia during the seventeenth century. The company agreed to pay the contractor $25 a month for each man sent, and then the contractor made his own arrangements with the individual coolie - generally doling out four to eight dollars a month in wages and retaining the remainder as payment for ocean passage and food. It was a slave system, but the Panama Railroad Company was not averse to using slaves if they would help complete the road.

The railroad barons knew of this exploitation. Just like we know of the exploitation of illegal aliens who are brought in to break unions and drive down wages of native workers. This shameful business is part of the revolution in China: Mao and his sorts got legitimacy from their opposition to this business! Of course, all revolutions end in new slavery which is intresting since humans have been enslaving each other since the dawn of humanity.

I will also note how the Holocaust industry makes lots of noise about that event but there are no memorials to the Chinese coolies who died building our empire. History books barely mention them. Our complicity in their exploitation is seldom broached. The Chinese are very proud people and they don't want to harp on this dreadful history but it must be faced.

The government agents responsible for enslavement should be vigorously opposed and exposed. But hark, I do see another enslavement story that got zero force from the entire USA media. It was only covered in the very last days.

The Pakistan’s renowned human rights activist Ansar Burney has said that some fourty thousand innocent children mostly from Asian countries including Pakistan, India and Bangladesh are working on slave labour as ‘child camel jockeys’ in miserable circumstances in UAE and Middle East and Arab countries.

I covered this story back when it broke. It took forever for it to make it into the American mainstream media. This is because the need to portray the evil, corrupt kings and lords in the Arab world, the oil pumping pimps of the Gulf, as 'moderates' who are supporting 'liberty' meant this would clash with the propaganda and clue people in to what was going on. So it was simply ignored just like we ignore the history of exploiting Chinese labor here in America.

When my parents were stationed in Saudi Arabia in the 1970's, slavery was totally legal and practiced by all the richer families. Due to exposure in the European, not American, media, the British strongarmed the Saudi royals to end slavery which they did with tremendous reluctance. To this day, stories of enslavement by these families rises to the surface occassionally such as the tendency to take slaves to America and keep them under wraps as they are whipped, made to work long hours and starves. One such slave managed to escape her mistress and flee but the State Department and the Saudi royals conspired to sneak the criminal who enslaved the servant, home where she is probably beating slaves every day in her palace there.

Which takes me back to the Chinese government officials enslaving people: people in glass houses built by slaves have no right to throw stones.

The home of dark red wines, Languedoc-Roussillon, is suffering from both cultural change of tastes and free trade causing home markets to fall in price. This, in turn, is triggering political agitation leading to even open terrorism. French farmers have a long history of political unrest and revolts some of them very famous indeed. The election trumpetted by the media across the globe which pushed exclusively on behalf of the right wing candidate ended up not being the big victory they hoped to create. Instead, the country is going anti-international with a leader whose family is recent immigrants who exploited French fears of alien revolts. But the new government now has to deal with a nativist revolt brewing in the south.

Except this was not an ultimatum from al-Qaeda but from a group of radical wine growers in the south of France. In a tape sent anonymously to French TV a month ago, the shadowy militant organisation known as CRAV (Comité Régional d'Action Viticole or regional winegrowers' action committee) threatened violent action if new President Nicolas Sarkozy did not take measures to help economically desperate wine growers in the France's vast Languedoc-Roussillon area.

This news perked up my ears. My first encounter with wines, aside from the sip of cheap wines at communion, was when I was a student in Europe in 1968. I started off on light Rhein wein and worked my way up to the deep red wines of southern France. It took a while to get used to the strong flavor and sharper palate but over the years, I learned to like it and now prefer dark wines and deep purple grapes.

Just the other day, I did a small tractor chore for a neighbor. She rummaged around her house and ran outside with a bottle of very dark French wine and I happily hoisted it into the seat and drove home. This is a wine you drink while eating something hearty. Snails and fresh bread with garlic butter...yummy.

Once, in Montreal, I went out to dine and despite my obvious (ridiculous) American a'ccent, I ordered that simple combo and requested the maître d' show me some of the stronger red wines, he was estatic and changed from being distant and uninterested into happily showing me and letting me sample a variety of wines. One of my nieces discovered, when she was dating a rock star from Lyons, if she asked for the darker wines of Provance, she would be instantly embraced by everyone.

But in general, wines are blushing ever lighter. The white wines are easier with various foods and dominate most dining in the evening. The mid-range wines are increasingly popular and all this is at the expense of the richer, denser wines from France. In addition, thanks to free trade, wines churned out by other countries are now flooding France itself. Thus, the anger of French winemakers.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right party won a comfortable majority in parliamentary elections.
But his UMP party fell far short of the landslide win predicted for it in the second-round vote, with the Socialist opposition faring better than expected.

The UMP won 314 seats in the 577-member assembly, while the Socialists won 185. Voter turnout was low, at about 60%.

The mass media has spent a lot of energy trying to convince everyone that this election was going to be a giant victory for free trade and France will embrace the USA because of what? We are going to buy their red wines? Please.

The anticipated victory barely eked through.

The UMP and its allies' 314-seat majority is smaller than the 359 seats they held in the previous parliament, when Jacques Chirac was president.

The Socialists and their allies won 185 seats, up from 149 in the previous assembly.

It looks more like both parties will end up yo-yoing back and forth while all the minor parties will be eaten up. The question of free trade will be very much an issue here and the despair of the southern regions can cook into something interesting for this region has been not only wracked by destruction but also is the breeding ground of revolutionaries and leaders as well as being culturally and in other ways, connected with Corsica and the Pyrenees mountain folks. Normally, right wing candidates are supported by these regional farmers but this is probably why they are taking this novel and dangerous step to give warning to the new President who troubles them due to his uncertain past.

The Albigensian Crusade or Cathar Crusade (1209 - 1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated by the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate the heresy of the Cathars of Languedoc.

When Innocent III's diplomatic attempts to roll back Catharism met with little success, he declared a crusade against Languedoc, offering the lands of the schismatics to any French nobleman willing to take up arms. The violence, extreme even by medieval standards, led to France's acquiring of lands with closer cultural and linguistic ties to Catalonia (see Occitan).

The Albigensian Crusade also had a role in the creation and institutionalization of both the Dominican Order and the Medieval Inquisition.

The Troubadors of Medieval lore came first from this same wine-growing region. Queen Eleanor, mother of Richard the Lionhearted, ruled this land and after her death, it was ripped to shreds and the culture suppressed. Despite the ruination that has swept this rich land, the vines are replanted and the culture struggles back to life. Provincial style was looked down upon by the aesthetes of Paris but it enjoys even today, great popularity for its comfort and unpretensious style. It is the crossroads between the ocean culture of the Mediterranean, Spanish tastes and the dominance of Italy. This makes it a popular vacation spot.

Vins & Terroirs du Languedoc head office settled in Carcassonne a world wide known medieval city in the heart of the Languedoc Roussillon vineyard. Such a situation makes it possible to follow up production and more particularly our own producers through out the year.

Languedoc Roussillon is one of the most important wine growing area in the world where the production of quality wines is increasing in Vins de Pays d'Oc as well as A.O.C wines. Vins & Terroirs du Languedoc is specialized only in wines produced by this vineyard which enables us to focus our attention on grape growing and production :

We help and give our wine farmers technical advice.

We keep looking for new wines in order to meet with the needs of the market.

Many outsiders, charmed by this lovely region, are stepping in and trying to change things. Of course, this doesn't please the natives who, like many people who live in long-settled regions, resents this sort of interference. I remember meeting families in Germany that lived in the same house for 600 years or more! And still did nearly everything on their farms they did for much of that time! One family showed me a 'modern' toilet installed in 1845! Wow!

Outsiders can't understand this sort of hyper-conservativism but I now think I see their good reasoning: the old ways worked. They preserved the land and kept things going. They require minimum intervention and stress since everything has basically evolved together, as a unit, as an organic whole. So what seems like simple changes often bring a host of difficulties one can't see until it is too late. The natural feeling is one of suspicion even if things seem better in the short run.

Unfortunately for the people of this region of the world, their proud past is cutting their ability to sell and survive in today's markets. I used to raise exotic sheep who evolved for cold, mountainous climates with lots of snow. They had wonderful wool, perfect for weaving waterproof garments, for example. The wool was very kinky. Suddenly, the wool market was flooded with all sorts of other kinds of wool and my own market got submerged and I had to give up my flock!

These changes are sweeping the farming world and unlike the mega-farms and vinyards of say, California, in the mountains, one can only have small farmholds. And this is true of France whose farms have been a historic patchwork-quilt of odd and ends assembled by marriage, death and how many sons divided an estate. This sort of farming can be good for nature and evolution because it prevents monoculture farming. And many of the 'successes' of modern farming has really been the reckless rapine of nature, polluting the soil, water and killing off much of the wildlife.

I used to hunt mushrooms in Europe and then cook them in butter which I got from some nearby farm and the variety of cows was a joy to explore which is why I got Brown Swiss when I moved here (both have died, alas). Walking through the Alps, I foraged for various cheeses and butters and used them on the breads each farmer sold me or often, simply gave to me since I was interested in the cows, the horses and all the farming techniques. I learned a great deal from that distant journey and have applied them to my own farm here in America.

But all my ventures fail financially due to dropping prices and competition from the strange fruits of modern farm technology. I still hunt mushrooms here and eat them on bread I bake and I will buy French wine for this one-two-three combo. But modern life seems bent on eliminating these simple yet complex pleasures.

Chuck: If you are going to deal in low end wines and you are that kind of distributor, you go for the cheaper price. The wines coming in from Australia now are absolutely rock bottom. I don't know how they can ship them in here at that price and still have everyone make a profit on it. I don't think California land prices will ever allow us to compete with those types of wines.

Angelo: In our case, we are going to do all we can to produce grapes of quality and stay out of that lower price range. Economically, it's the only way we can continue to exist.

Walter: Our land is too expensive. Our production costs and unit costs are too high. You're not going to change those kinds of costs. It's just not possible to try to compete at certain low price levels. Even in the Central Valley, if people discover that their grapes are no longer in demand at a certain price, they are going to rip them out and plant something else. We can't afford to do that up here.

Most winemakers in France are accustomed to simply producing wine like their ancestors and they assume people would happily drink it. But this is blasted away by the flood of wines from Australia and guess who killed my flock of sheep?

Australia flooding the markets with excess wool that the government was trying to unload due to the high cost of storing all this. Countries trying to unload excess farm products are undercutting each other and this is the deep, dark nasty mess that is pushing farmers across the earth to revolt. Korean farmers have irritated the ruling elites at the Doha round meetings, committing ritual suicide in the streets outside. Elsewhere, farmers riot when they learn the terms of new trade agreements. And thanks to all this, the Amazon is being leveled as desperate farmers there try to grow beef and soybeans for export. And the price of cattle here continues to drop even as the price of corn for fattening them soars as we try to use this for making gasoline.

First, Patrick is deeply involved in winemaking in several different regions of France. For a winemaker, and particularly a French winemaker, this is highly unusual. Patrick's broad experience gives him a wider perspective on wine and winemaking, as well as the freedom to experiment and take risks to produce superior wine.

Second, Patrick's activities should be seen in the global context of the dramatic changes in viticulture and élevage (grape growing and wine making) of the last 10 years. Responding to the challenges of intense competition from winemakers in California, Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, the historically dominant European producers have made significant efforts to improve the quality of their products. In France, with its ancient, venerable estates and long traditions of wine making, these changes have been associated with the arrival of a new generation of winemakers (often sons of illustrious fathers) willing to invest, to take risks and to dare to make great wines. Patrick has been in the vanguard of this movement to return to organic agriculture and natural, non-interventionist winemaking.

Third, Patrick owns no vineyards. Typically, a producer not owning vineyards has been seen as a negative, showing a potential lack of consistency. Patrick, conversely, believes it to be an advantage since he is less tied down to the production of any one set of vineyards which may have suffered from disastrous weather or disease in a particular vintage. Instead, he has the freedom and flexibility to shift production to other estates or even other regions where it may be possible to produce superior wines in a given year.

The brokers are moving in and rearranging the natural movement of business and this is not an slight change, the changes will ripple down through the systems until it totally undoes 3,000 years of evolution of wine growing and the winemaking culture and ethos will vanish. The culture of farming all over the planet is under attack from these same forces. Small farms in England are being turned into Midwestern-style farms and the destruction of the farm ecology there has taken a huge toll on butterflies, moths, field rodents, foxes and many kinds of flowers, hedges and trees. The American Midwest has been ruined in a similar fashion. Chinese farming is very ancient and very intense as well as successful and it is being hammered now by many forces including over-farming the land.

This fight will increase and I see no end to it. I hate to see thousands of years of agricultural culture die. This is a very important struggle and I am on the side of the traditionalists here.

The Japanese game of weakening the currency of the world's #2 economy and #1 trade surplus is now beginning to backfire thanks to the ever-more powerful euro and the fact that China, by raising the value of the yuan versus the dollar, had made the yuan a popular currency with all countries bordering China and is spreading the yuan further and further while the yen hides in a dark hole and dies slowly. The suicide of the Liberal Party official involves him cheating Chinese peasants. Heh. And Japanese businesses needing to sell to Japanese are struggling to stay alive in a depression economy.

In East Asia, the cross-border flow of people has been increasing rapidly in recent years, especially out of China. One major driver of the swelling migration of people in the region is the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) development program, promoted by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). One key project under the program is aimed at rapidly building a network of roads connecting Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Yunnan province and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in China.

China has signed free trade agreements with the other countries involved in the GMS program after an aggressive diplomatic campaign. Income gaps between China's booming coastal areas and the less developed inland region are not showing any signs of narrowing, so there are strong incentives for Chinese living inland to move out of their villages and towns in search of better economic fortunes.

All these factors are generating a massive and constant flow of people from inland China into neighboring countries.

Oh ho! I have detailed over the last three years the busy, busy Chinese bees, Hu and Wen. We must pay attention to who is visiting when and where! I track this vital information via Xinhua news. The many trips of this dynamic duo have just begun to pay off as China opens roads and rail services to all its neighbors. They are increasing commerce everywhere and it isn't just governmental or top corporate interests, it is classic merchants doing classic business things: lots and lots of little business people working long hours to open businesses all over the place, frontier towns attracting the most dynamic of the peasant classes as they go forth to conquer capitalism by becoming capitalists!

The ways Japan and China are making inroads into the region are very different. Japanese investment and aid are usually invisible to ordinary people and flow directly into state coffers, banks and factories' vaults. The Chinese yuan, in contrast, is brought by Chinese to people in the region along with merchandise. For ordinary people in the region, settlements in yen or the creation of a yen bloc are more or less abstract concepts, and they probably find it hard to emotionally connect to these ideas. But the yuan is something quite familiar to them, and it is much easier for them to understand the use of the Chinese currency as an international currency like the dollar.

The Chinese currency is gradually penetrating the region as Chinese products and people are increasing their presence.

And wherever they go, they don't seek dollars, they use yuan! And why not? The dollar is WEAKENING vis a vis the yuan so only a very stupid person would want to collect dollars. And where a currency goes, there goes the neigborhood! Namely, the yuan is gaining popularity in lands that used to be filled with people wanting to do business in dollars! And this is important for the US needs to have the world soak up our excess $1.5 trillion in red ink we pour forth every year. If the Chinese decide to be very cruel, they might make the value of the yuan rise 40% versus the dollar. That will teach us a very sharp lesson.

And it will cause problems for Japan. The Japanese had to accept the idea the dollar was the supreme currency of Asia thanks to WWII and the Vietnam war. But now that is fading fast and Japan has been caught flat-footed. The Chinese fury over past insults led to the near destruction of trade just two years ago. Since then, the Japanese try to tone down their tendency to insult but this is barely below the surface if not totally open. The above article accuses the Chinese of being loud and pushy, for example.

Note: HAHAHA. The Japanese are this way, too. They just can't see themselves. Ditto the US population. Or Europeans. Everyone who thinks they are gods are pushy. I'm very pushy. Heh.

The Japanese prefer to use their money to leverage the officials running countries whereas much of the imputus for trade with all of China's neighbors is organic. The people themselves are creating it.

A slain former executive of a farm association had forced Chinese trainees to pay sizable fees that had already been covered by the farmers who accepted the trainees, sources said.

The funds provided by the trainees remain largely unaccounted for, they added.

Most of about 150 Chinese workers on a farm training program offered by the Chiba Agriculture Association had paid between 40,000 yuan and 110,000 yuan (about 600,000 yen and 1.65 million yen) under the pretext of training fees and travel expenses, according to a survey conducted by the association.

"The system whose initial purpose is to transfer technologies to developing countries is being exploited as a juicy business," Ippei Torii, general secretary of Zentoitsu Workers Union, which supports foreign workers, said of the foreign trainee-intern system.

Why would Chinese workers pay the astonishing amount of $12,000 for a chance of learning Japanese farming methods?

Looking at what the preferred modus operandi of Chinese peasants, it is to open small businesses inside of neighboring countries, isn't it? And so, since Japan is ripe for such business since the Japanese government keeps out competition for the most part, and since wages have suffered hideously the last few years, people rush to stores selling stuff cheap! And Japan is notorious for not letting in anyone at all which is why they are in trouble on so many levels with a dropping population.

The Liberal party is utterly corrupt. It is owned by the businessmen who run Japan and they have only one thing in mind: to extend their financial and industrial empires. But the weakness of the Japanese home base is causing many problems as the other Asian nations rush to undersell Japan and Japanese businessmen are running around, outsourcing like mad because they dare not let even a breath of inflation enter the Japanese economic castle.

The Japanese system is so rotted, they can't even have the fiction of two parties anymore. It is more a one-party state than either China or Russia.

Japan Airlines Corp. has asked its four major creditors to provide hundreds of billions of yen to bolster its capital base, sources said.

The four banks, including the Development Bank of Japan and Mizuho Corporate Bank, may require the struggling airline to carry out further restructuring, for example, by reducing its payroll costs, analysts said.

All over Japan, payrolls are being purged or reduced. Everyone is seeing cut backs and so business within Japan continues to shrink. Eventually, it will vanish, I suppose! If the Bank of Japan made the yen more valuable, Japanese people might be able to afford to fly to China and go shopping! But alas for them, they can't. So the Chinese get richer and the Japanese head towards the poorhouse.

I was chastized at other websites when I talked about the fake depression in Japan. Some writers assured me, things are great in Japan. But when I read the news or look at the data, it looks really bad for anyone who isn't part of the Liberal Party's ruling elites and even they are committing suicide after yenning and yuanning everyone to death.

Scandal-plagued electronics maker Sanyo said Monday it trimmed its losses for the fiscal year and forecast a return to profit for the current year as it cut costs.

Sanyo Electric Co. (nasdaq: SANYY - news - people ) has undergone a reshuffle at its top management after acknowledging recently it had falsified its fiscal 2003 earnings, in which it had reported a profit but could have been in the red.

With a loss of 45.4 billion yen ($373 million) for the fiscal year through March, Sanyo has now posted losses for the three years running. But that was better than the 205.7 billion yen loss the previous year.

Sanyo sells not only globally but locally. And this is why starving one's homebase is so stupid. The foundation of any business must be their homebase! From that platform, they can move outwards. If having a super-cheap currency were so great, why don't all nations simply charge 0% interest and print money like mad? The Japanese, in chosing this path, have enjoyed significant success but only against one party, the US giant. And the logic of the system is now beginnning to show: the dollar is now becoming as worthless as the stupid yen. The world's two top nations can't both have a dead currency at the same time!

And this is where shifting gears matters. The euro at first wanted to be weak so they could penetrate American markets but now, the European market is big enough, they don't need the dollar or the dumb Americans! The pie charts from the BBC in my earlier posting today shows clearly that the US share of world trade is being squeezed by both the European Union and China.

Since the mid-20th century, the de facto world currency has been the United States dollar. According to Robert Gilpin in Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order (2001): "Somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of international financial transactions are denominated in dollars. For decades the dollar has also been the world's principle reserve currency; in 1996, the dollar accounted for approximately two-thirds of the world's foreign exchange reserves"
*snip*
As of December 2006, the euro surpassed the dollar in the combined value of cash in circulation. The value of euro notes in circulation has risen to more than €610 billion, equivalent to US$800 billion at the exchange rates at this time.

Funny, isn't it? The euro's growth in circulation echoes the growth in the American trade deficits. I bet this harmonic relationship isn't accidental. The fact that the US has lost control of half of its currency is significant. I know where that money is hiding! Go to the International Monetary Fund and you can see a lot of this is being held in FOREX reserves so big nations can control the fate of the US economy and currency! And suspicions rise rapidly, seeing that Japan is the #2 holder of American script. The US, in turn, holds a mere $12 billion yen to Japan's $900 billions in dollars. This unequal relationship is due to Americans wanting to betray us to the Japanese who still smart from their defeat in WWII.

And how do I know this? Simple. They won't pay reparations to the people they enslaved and murdered and the leaders worship the war criminals we executed. 'Nuff said.

China publishes a story today, boasting about their great IIP numbers. The international Investment Position data is very important, so important, I spent hours trying to riddle them out. Finding the data for the US was impossible. But I did get the Bank of Japan and talk about an eye-popping report! A must read for anyone who wants to talk about international power politics.

Wu said that Washington runs a relatively big trade deficit with Beijing in its trade in goods, which is an objective fact that China has never evaded.

The U.S. trade deficit is the result of multifaceted and complicated factors, but "we believe it is mainly of a shifted and structural nature and is related to U.S. export control against China," she added.

She said that export control applied by the United States against China has constrained the export of internationally competitive U.S. high-technology products to China.

For the period between 2001 and 2006, the proportion of U.S. high-tech export to China's aggregate high-tech imports decreased from 18.3 percent to 9.1 percent. If that ratio was kept at 18.3 percent today, U.S. exports to China would have increased by at least 70 billion dollars, according to the vice premier.

China was blocked out of the market for our top computers and technological stuff. They are correct that they would have bought a lot more stuff if we had an open market. The US loves to pretend our markets are open but this is a fiction. The parts that are open are the parts that affect the American worker: it makes things cheaper for them so our government can produce the effects of depressions instead of inflation. There is, of course, inflation. But the depressed prices of various unimportant items or in one singular case, cars, means the government can pretend there is no inflation.

I was in Home Depot today, looking at the price of building materials. You would think they would be way down since the housing market is dead. Nope! The price of plywoods were from $12 to $45 a sheet! Just 8 years ago, it was from $6 to $25 a sheet. Sheetrock that was $3.50 a sheet was $9+ a sheet. So prices of the basic elements for building houses was much higher. But the price of tiles and toilets and other things were lower...because they were made in China. All the stuff made in China was the same price as several years ago. All the stuff made in America like plywood were much higher than before. So, to keep the illusion there is no inflation, China steps up to the plate and rescues the Federal Reserve.

Every time financial data is assembled, the Chinese happily publish it. In the opposite corner, the US ignores all this information because it is very nasty. So we pretend it doesn't matter or exist. We can celebrate our seeming wealth so long as we ignore all the indicators that show relative wealth and value.

Overseas stock exchanges including NYSE Euronext and Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. said they plan to open offices in China for the first time, amid efforts to woo Chinese companies to their bourses.

NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq, London Stock Exchange Plc and Deutsche Boerse AG are all preparing to set up representative offices in China when regulations that take effect on July 1 allow them to do so, said the bourses' executives at a private equity conference in Beijing today.

``Setting up shop locally will allow us to conduct many more promotional activities on the ground, and to be in closer touch with Chinese companies,'' Rainer Reiss, a Frankfurt-based managing director at Deutsche Boerse, said in an interview today.

I am full of admiration for the crafty Chinese. They certainly know how to negotiate as if they were playing poker on a Go board! They withheld goodies they knew our rulers lust for: access to the vital, living, growing Chinese stock and banking markets! Japan, living in this stupid straitjacket economy at home that is a grinding, evil depression, can't attract hardly anyone nor do they want to attract anyone. They have a 'Do Not Enter' sign on the front door to Tokyo. The same one they hung out in the past, the one Perry threw away only they dusted it off and put it back up.

I thought, how darling, how SWEET the Chinese were, talking about their IIP data! The US won't talk about that in the major media. They want us to ignore this and not understand the numbers or the meaning of the universe of money. Well! I decided, it's time to visit the Bank of Japan! Yes, they really do have a web page. But the data is in a really crummy, stupid, hard to use and read format. So I took an hour to untangle it and make it readable. They should pay me for this but looking at the alarming numbers, I suspect they will send ninjas to my mountain to assassinate me. Heh.

Total trade
with world:-----------¥534,759-------------------¥ 312,317

OK! Since virtually no one in America is going off to the Bank of Japan to see exactly how the Japanese have run circles around us since 9/11, here are the stark numbers: The total of investments the Japanese are making worldwide is pretty big. But if you subtract the US numbers from the world numbers, it is ¥348,755,000,000 which is 300 trillion yen with the whole world. The Japanese are spending a ton of money in the US: ONE THIRD of their entire investments in the WORLD!

Is this because we are a great country or is it because they need to penetrate our markets and to do this, they must hire a bunch of Americans to work for them so they will be able to slip through our open door? And not suffer political attacks like we are ladling on the Chinese every day? Is it a great thing for all American auto workers to end up working for Japan? We see they are interested in one thing: dominating our domestic markets and reducing wages and benefits of our workers.

The amount spent on manufacturing is grossly greater in the US than any other country or collection of countries, for that matter. Subtract the US factory amounts from the global amounts and it is ¥193,638. NEARLY 1/2 of all of Japanese investments in factories are in the US!!!!! This isn't because American workers are super-cheap and super-good! So let's look at China: Japan spends ¥90 trillion more in the US compared to super-cheap China! Incidentally, China enjoys a trade surplus with Japan! This is why we are whining at China but not Japan. Japan owns us. Japan fears China that is getting super-rich off of trade with their US slaves. That sticks in the Bank of Japan's craw.

Japanese investments in factories in the US are four times greater than in China. I am betting, Japan is scared of strengthening China so they simply refused to do any major business there and focused entirely on dominating and controlling the US. Their success has been nearly total but also fatal. It has weakened the US so significantly, the US let CHINA do the exact same thing! So China is now getting rapidly stronger without Japan having any influence at all. This strategy of Japan's will go down as one of history's biggest blunders next to the American imperial collapse.

Japan also took great delight in colonizing England. They fought this very bitter war against England and the USA called 'WWII'. Most Americans seem to have forgotten what that war was all about. I will give a clue: economic dominance. Banzai! But Japan failed to dominate their nearest neighbor, China. And now the dragon is wide awake and if we forgot what was at stake during WWII, the Chinese dragon has a long, nasty memory. And its eyes are focused on Japan! They have zero desire to rule the US. They actually would rather we stayed a whole nation as a counterbalance to Europe and Russia. But they do want Taiwan, dearly, and they want Japan to be under THEIR wing, not the US!

Against the background of the generally favorable developments in overseas economies, Japan's economy has continued to expand moderately. Although exports to the United States are somewhat weak, overall exports continue to increase steadily reflecting the expansion of overseas economies. Business fixed investment continues to increase as corporate profits remain high. Production decreased in the January-March quarter of 2007 in reaction to the high growth in the previous quarter led by production in automobile-related goods, but it seems to be on a trend of 1 percent quarter-on-quarter growth.

As for the household sector, although growth of wages per worker has been somewhat sluggish due mainly to weak regular payments, employee income has continued to rise moderately supported by the increase in the number of employees. Property income such as dividends is also increasing. In this situation, growth in private consumption has recently resumed its upward movement, after sluggish growth over the summer of 2006 due to unfavorable weather conditions and consumers' reluctance to buy before the introduction of new products.

In sum, although the pace of improvement in the household sector has been somewhat slow relative to the strength in the corporate sector, Japan's economy as a whole is expanding moderately.

Toyota becomes the #1 auto company on earth and JAPAN'S exports are floundering????? HAHAHA. But if we look at the numbers above, it is obvious that this is because the Toyota factories are now in the US which is why they are desperate to drop wages here. This 'weakness' in 'exports' hasn't stopped Japanese powerful industrial giants from getting massively big profits, of course. It is horrible, reading this man's speech. He, like me, knows why Japanese wages are 'sluggish'. He is directly responsible for this! The 'moderate' growth in Japan is in stark contrast with China where growth is racing along at a heedless pace.

Now, I am a rather curious person so I went tromping around the US Treasury and the more evil, nasty little realm of Bernanke and his Reservists who have one of the world's most pathetic reserves. All this, seeking the IIP data the Chinese put in their commie newspaper, Xinhua and which the Bank of Japan has in a very difficult to read format. Well! I can't find it! I looked in the realms of Congress, all over, Googled all over and nothing!

1. The Federal Open Market Committee authorizes and directs the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, for System Open Market Account, to the extent necessary to carry out the Committee's foreign currency directive and express authorizations by the Committee pursuant thereto, and in conformity with such procedural instructions as the Committee may issue from time to time:

A. To purchase and sell the following foreign currencies in the form of cable transfers through spot or forward transactions on the open market at home and abroad, including transactions with the U.S. Treasury, with the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund established by Section 10 of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, with foreign monetary authorities, with the Bank for International Settlements, and with other international financial institutions:

B. To hold balances of, and to have outstanding forward contracts to receive or to deliver, the foreign currencies listed in paragraph A above.

C. To draw foreign currencies and to permit foreign banks to draw dollars under the reciprocal currency arrangements listed in paragraph 2 below, provided that drawings by either party to any such arrangement shall be fully liquidated within 12 months after any amount outstanding at that time was first drawn, unless the Committee, because of exceptional circumstances, specifically authorizes a delay.

D. To maintain an overall open position in all foreign currencies not exceeding $25.0 billion. For this purpose, the overall open position in all foreign currencies is defined as the sum (disregarding signs) of net positions in individual currencies. The net position in a single foreign currency is defined as holdings of balances in that currency, plus outstanding contracts for future receipt, minus outstanding contracts for future delivery of that currency, i.e., as the sum of these elements with due regard to sign.

How on earth can we make the yuan stronger if we won't buy any? Huh? And we are buying yen? True! I looked at the IMF data and there it is: we are holding a whole rice bowl of yen. But no yuan as far as I can tell. I really can't fathom what these guys are up to and this is deliberate on their part. We do know from the results that they are spectacularily incompetent and destructive. Just because they are hiding the hard numbers from us doesn't mean these numbers are kind. I will note the Japanese lords love to talk about our economic destruction, calling for a 'soft landing' which echoes the rants of our idiots running the Reserves and the Treasury.

But Japan put too many eggs in the US basket and if we become a basket case, it won't be China that will be hurting, it will be Japan! Few people recognize this but looking at the news this year and how the Chinese are playing ever-harder ball with Japan and the US, I suspect they are reading the data accurately, they can see the streaming numbers and figured out the meaning of all this. Or maybe they read this blog! Heh.

I wish someone in DC could read this. Maybe someone can give me the IIP numbers for the US. I can't spend half my day, looking for them. I have a horse to feed, chicken eggs to collect, fields to mow!

The United States International Trade Commission is filled with right wing traitors who cheerfully green light the destruction of the American worker, all in the name of reducing 'inflation'. This way, the Reserve can print money and not have it show up as inflation, making all the financiers very, very rich. Which is why they keep on doing this horrible thing! Time to see the raw data, the raw reports.

This study made for Bush and the New World Order religious fanatics is full of hellish visions of American workers reduced to welfare in the name of keeping inflation down via heavy imports from cheaper places, particularily China. Not to mention, Mexico.

This document is PROOF the gab about forcing China to reduce its trade surplus with the US is totally fake. They were not twisting arms but rather, pulling legs. Always, one must go to the source for information and the fact that most economic reporters cover the news without ever refering to the core documents or past history is why we are so ill-informed.

But this isn't accidental! This is malicious and deliberate. They don't want anyone to know what the New World Order is up to. The recent deal to increase flights carrying Chinese workers and to increase the penetration of Chinese financial markets by Americans seeking wealth, removing it from the US and investing in China: we were conned, we were betrayed this week. As I expected.

They are expecting more people on welfare, another $3.7 billion worth! Note that these same heartless creatures are also the architects of cutting welfare in the name of moral uplift. These are also the same people who refuse to protect our borders and let a flood of 20 million+ illegal aliens to invade despite the claims that we are at war with terror and must protect our borders.

A sign the clowns writing this report are liars is the last line where they claim that if they 'liberalize' trade in the name of Free Trade, the deficits and surpluses will be totally balanced. At no point in the last 35 years, has that happened. NOT ONE TIME. And if you read this report, even the authors admit in each summary that there will be a huge hit on American businesses and workers.

Each of these summaries of the impact of free trade if we lift the pitiful few last tariffs and barriers is sober reading. Often, it will cause prices to drop to up to 40% and employment to collapse. They don't even dare speculate how badly truck drivers will be hit when they open our borders. They claim, Mexicans will invest in American transport systems. Right. By driving out of business, all American companies.

Since the very creatures writing this report can't paper over the obvious, they simply disregard all of our past experiences with 'free trade' and assume Americans will move to other jobs. Hell, they don't even bother pretending these will be good jobs, they admit the new work will pay less. This is incredible. No other nation wants to do this so why are we? We are the destination of 24% of all world trade and proof of this is our $800+ billion trade deficit with the world.

If one is digging a tunnel to China, the best way to stop it is to throw away the shovel and climb up a rope, out of this hole!

China's trade in goods will surpass US$2.1 trillion in 2007, a 20 percent year-on-year increase, the Ministry of Commerce said in a report yesterday.

Trade will increase in a fast yet stable manner as China optimizes economic structure, improves efficiency and lowers energy consumption, said the report, which is based on a review of China's foreign trade in 2006 and the first quarter of 2007.

China's total import and export volume amounted to US$1.76 trillion in 2006, up 23.8 percent year-on-year. China remains the third-largest country in the world by trade volume, according to the report released by the China Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, a research body under the Ministry of Commerce.

Incredible, isn't it? Most of the stuff in the Trade report was concerning stuff from China...and Mexican workers. This one-two punch is reducing the American work force to the level of peasants and if they want to avoid that fate, time is now running out since the rich Democrats running Congress just betrayed everyone and voted for Bush, the right to sign these very same trade treaties that are killing us.

Cars are next on the long list. And aircraft as well as rockets. Just this week, the Chinese launched a satellite for Nigeria. They intend to take over all these high-tech, high-value added businesses. They aren't going to be selling cheap stuff to Walmart too much longer!

U.S. health officials pummeled the Chinese with questions about contaminated pet food ingredients, blamed for killing scores of pets in the United States. "The Chinese government clearly understands that the world marketplace will swiftly disadvantage any nation or economy or firm that is not able to establish a sense of confidence or reliability or safety," said Mike Leavitt, secretary of health and human services.

Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez said the two sides also made progress on one of China's complaints about the United States -- that its controls on high-tech exports are too strict. He said that the Commerce Department explained "the steps we will take" to sell more technology to trusted Chinese customers. He would not elaborate.

What great negotiations...snark. We get better cheap dog food, woof. And China will get the last of our high technology. OK. I think I see where we will win this. We will sell the Chinese our dogs.

He noted that China and Germany have continued to be the largest trade partners of each other in their respective regions, reached a unprecedented high level for culture, education, science and technology, environmental protection and justice cooperation, and strengthened contacts and coordination in international and regional issues.

He expressed his appreciation for Germany's adherence to the one-China policy.

Hu proposed that the two countries enhance their partnership with global responsibility from four aspects, including deepening political ties featuring equality and mutual trust, expanding win-win economic and trade cooperation, strengthening understanding and friendship between the two peoples and promoting international coordination within multilateral framework.

For years now, Germany has been more liberal than the US over high tech trades with China. German workers are getting agitated about outsourcing, it is just beginning to bite there. This week, telecom workers had a strike over the outsourcing of 50,000 jobs. The number of jobs being outsourced in all the top countries is astronomical. Millions and millions of jobs. But China has a billion workers and this will go on and on. Even Japan is outsourcing jobs to China like mad and their biggest trade deficit on earth is with China. This is why they are so hostile right now.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development raised its forecast for global growth this year, predicting the economies of Europe and Japan will outpace the U.S. for the first time in 16 years.

The economy of the group's 30 members will expand 2.7 percent this year, stronger than the 2.5 percent expected in November, the Paris-based group said in its semi-annual economic outlook. The estimate for 2008 was unchanged at 2.7 percent.

The OECD joins the International Monetary Fund in betting that strong growth in Europe and Japan, along with booming demand in China and India, means the world economy is weathering a U.S. slowdown. The Washington-based IMF, which covers 185 economies, last month left its global growth forecast unchanged at 4.9 percent, even as it cut its outlook for the U.S.

China, the EU and JAPAN willl all grow while we shrink. Are we the Wicked Witch of the West and will shriek, 'I'm shrinking' as the water melts us?

Greenspan, the evilist man on earth, yapped yesterday that China's hot market might tank. This led to panic in the gullible classes. Of course, the Chinese stock market can crash, all markets can do this. Everyone is looking to the dragon of China to see what will happen next because China is now the fulcrum of the world's trade and finances. Whatever China does will cause the whole world to flip out or beg for more.

China needs to ``shock'' the economy with more interest-rate increases because it's too late to use a stronger yuan to cool growth, said Jim Walker, chief economist at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets.

The Chinese government is too concerned about derailing export growth as the U.S. economy slows to let the yuan rise faster, Hong Kong-based Walker said. Higher borrowing costs would prevent the flood of cheap credit from spurring a stock- market bubble and excessive investment.

``They really just need to take money out of the system,'' Walker said in an interview on May 22. ``China should have let the currency strengthen a long time ago, but it's too late. They're maintaining a very slow-moving appreciation so they can sell the goods they're producing.''

The idea that China just might let the entire world economic system go through a bad spasm doesn't occur to anyone except me. And the fact that China's rulers are communists determined to destroy American hegemony and then take back Taiwan and dominate Asia: this is a fact of life. This is, I assure everyone, their ultimate goal. The US investors are scared, China might hand us our heads.

Trust me, the Dragon will do this! It is the PLAN! We think China doesn't have 5 year plans anymore. They do. China doesn't dominate world auto markets yet. Nor aircraft. So they are patient. But if we want to see our heads spin, all we have to do is strengthen Taiwan. Boom.

China is very annoyed at wasting energy producing cheap stuff in competition with Vietnam and India. They plan to leave all the cheaper stuff to those countries and concentrate on high-value stuff like cars, trains, ships, rockets, nuclear bombs and nuclear power, etc, etc. And this is obvious. They are working frantically at these things. They are setting up one tech institute after another and making deals with all the top generators of modern technologies in preparation for the bankruptcy of the US empire.

Mike Whitney refers to this blog when talking about the goofy trade talks between the US deadbeats and the Chinese banking dragon. The ruling elites have betrayed us and in turn, the Chinese granted the Wall Street overlords access to the golden, hot Chinese stock markets so long as we don't stop this destructive trade relationship.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson wrapped up 2 days of high level talks with the Chinese delegation on Wednesday without any progress on the two issues of central importance to the American people"the massive $230 billion trade deficit and the ongoing manipulation of the Chinese currency, the yuan. As expected, China agreed to allow "more passenger flights between the two countries" and they also approved a plan "to remove a ban on the entry of new foreign brokerages and to allow financial services firms to expand their operations in China". (Marketwatch)

Mike is a marvelous writer who interviewed me last week. I always look forward to his stories and this latest is a good read. He points out a fact that NO major media points out but which I have reported in the past, Paulson works for Wall Street, NOT AMERICA. He is a traitor who makes deals for the super-rich at our expense.

Mike details how and why and I strongly suggest reading his latest article just for that .

But also, he talks about this news service. Heh. Kisses to Mike! Hugs, too.

I am probably the only person outside of the Chinese communist leadership who knows their long, long range plans. This is because my parents were stationed there off and on from 1976 to 1996. The Chinese didn't realize exactly how much a spy I am, I grew up spying on my spy parents, after all. And I got them to tell me what was really on their minds when some of them lived with me or visited me. They all thought they were pumping me for information when all I was doing was teaching them about banking and commerce.

A true story: some of them told me they would become real rich by gambling in Atlantic City. They all knew I got $20 a week and a free ride to the beach as the casinos tried to lure me into gambling only I never ever gamble. Having used up all my chances by being the only person on earth to survive multiple lightning strikes indoors, I literally won't 'push my luck'.

Back to the leaders of China: these people are running the trade with the US today. Back then, 20 years ago, they went happily and very haughtily to Atlantic City. Two days later, the guy who ran Shanghai's export markets since 1990, came to me, very embarrassed. He had lost every penny. None of them had any more money.

They couldn't go to the Consulate in Manhattan for help. Bang. Like, dead career! So I lent him money but he had to sign a little contract. He shovelled snow and moved trash and baby sat my son as well as cooking me lots of great dumplings. Heh.

He then had me teach him how the 'House' always wins. We played 21 which shows that game well. He then said, 'I'll be bank!' when the light turned on. I thought, 'Boy, are we in trouble now!'

Well, they are our bankers. This sucks for the US but then, we chose to go into debt. They didn't force us.

The name the Chinese gave me back then, the one their spy services used to refer to me was 'The White Bone Demon.'

The monk Xuanzhang , escorted by his disciples Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy, start out for the Western Paradise in search of Buddhist scriptures. The pilgrims press forward on their long, hard journey. One day they arrive at the White Tiger Mountain. The ever-watchful Monkey senses danger and volunteers to go ahead as a scout. He draws a magic circle around the others and tells them to stay inside it. “Don’t accost anyone while I am away,” he says, “and don’t touch any food.”

Now in this mountain there lives the White-bone Demon, a terror even among demons. Hearing that Xuanzhang has arrived with his disciples, she decides to go down the mountain and capture him. She is delighted to find Xuanzhang in meditation and is about to spring on him when golden rays shoot out from the circle and bar the way.

Unable to enter the magic circle, the demon changes into a coy young maiden and approaches the three with a basket of steamed buns in her hand. Greedy Pigsy smells the fragrant buns and races out of the circle to greet the girl. “I’m going over to the temple to offer sacrifices,” she says invitingly. Pigsy pulls Xuanzhang along to follow her.

I overheard a secret police officer visiting my 'student's' call me that name. I shocked all of them by laughing an evil chortle and showing them my comic book from China that was about this demon. In return, they showed me a Chinese TV show about the monkey king and this demon.

The fact is, I scared them. And the other fact is, I still scare them. They are approaching us as a cute chick, batting eyelashes. But I can see through them because I am a demon, too.

And if the USA wants to be the top dog in 50 years, they better listen to me. Acting like Pigsy is STUPID. Paulson is Pigsty. And Bush is trying to be the Monkey King only he is working for the demons. He belongs to a cult that prays to the Devil that is Death. He loves demons.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came to Washington with a Wall Street reputation for overcoming all obstacles in the way of a deal. He may have found the one hurdle he can't surmount: George W. Bush's damaged presidency.

On issues ranging from defusing trade tensions with China to overhauling Social Security, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief executive officer is playing down the notion of breakthroughs. Instead, he's talking about laying foundations for his successors.

None of the challenges ``avail themselves to a quick fix, but all of them we can make progress on,'' Paulson, 61, said in an interview in Washington yesterday after talks with Chinese officials that he conceded resulted in only ``incremental'' gains.

If Bush was more popular than Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, the results would be the same. These deals have nothing to do with popularity. And the cure: that will be very unpopular. We must raise the tax on the very rich to 90% of their gross incomes! Then we cut the military budget by 70% and bring home all the troops. Then we put up barriers and impose tariffs. And on top of this, we tax fossil fuels heavily with an energy fund for everyone in the bottom 50% of the nation, pro-rated, so they don't freeze to death or die from lack of energy and can commute.

Then require ALL houses to have solar units installed. And of course, rebuilding our rail roads and our shipping.

But none of this will happen. Americans love the role of Strassbourg Goose. We think we will get fatter and fatter and never face having our livers ripped out and eaten.

As Henry Kissinger once noted, "Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world." I would say, "Who controls the peasants controls the nation; who controls energy must control their own peasants; who controls buying of loans controls the world." We think that by running the Federal Reserve printing presses, this gives us power. It doesn't in the long run, we lose power as we print money. Time to look backwards at the monetary game between the US and Japan.

Opening Statement by Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. at the May 2007 Meeting of the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue

Washington, DC – Good morning. It is with great pleasure that I welcome Vice Premier Wu and your colleagues to Washington, and the second meeting of the Strategic Economic Dialogue.

Your visit is historically unprecedented. Never before have so many Ministers from China gathered in one place in the United States. The number of senior officials who are focusing their time and attention on this effort is a demonstration of our shared and on-going commitment to the vision and purpose of this dialogue. We both recognize how critical it is for our countries that we get our long-term economic relationship right.

Our bankers have arrived. China is by far and away the #1 buyer of our public debt. They also have the largest trade surplus with us and this surplus has filled their coffers in their reserve funds to overflowing. They control our economic fates except in one matter only: we can print or make up as much money as we wish and we have been doing this with a vengence. The #1 buyer of our bonds is our own Treasury which buys them from the Federal Reserve. And this causes inflation. Which is not 3% by any stretch of the imagination. Ask anyone pumping gas into their cars today.

The Chinese intend to get our long-term economic relationships straight, all right! That is, the US will eventually cease consuming 24% of world resources and be reduced to only 10%. This means we cut back on many, many things and the #1 item on that list is oil. This is why we were so anxious to invade Iraq and Iran: we need to secure their oil for ourselves as well as Canada and Mexico's oil.

From the Treasury press release:

When President Bush and President Hu created the SED last August, their leadership set us on a course that led to our inaugural December meeting in Beijing, has continued through a series of meetings among Chinese and U.S. officials since then, to this Washington gathering, and will continue after we leave here. An open, honest economic relationship between our two countries is pivotal to the future of the global economy. The SED is a forum to manage that relationship on a long-term strategic basis, for our mutual benefit, and to work towards near-term agreements that build confidence on both sides.

Since that disaster, China has carefully set up things so this time, we will be obedient and well-behaved. Of course, this will all fall apart as we bluster yet again at China.

We should stop this and simply set up our trade barriers and bite the bullet by raising taxes, cutting spending and eliminating all our foreign military obligations. China will love that last item and will then consolidate power in Asia but then, they will anyway. We should understand, we can't do this anymore and stop trying. For if China ousts us from Asia ten years from now with us bankrupt and in very bad condition versus doing it now and having some hope for the future...we should do it now.

When playing the ancient game of Go, when one side surrounds the area of another's side's stones, if one keeps adding stones to the area that is surrounded, this simply means you lose really badly because the winner is the one controlling the most territory WITHOUT occupying it! This is why giving up and reorganizing outside of a danger zone is life and death. Retreats don't mean routs if they are strategic or tactically correct. Clinging to an untenable situation is stupid.

From the Treasury press release:

Our task is not an easy one. We must address the immediate concerns that are impacting our industries and citizens and simultaneously identify tomorrow's issues. We must maintain a partnership, and engage in this process to solve what may seem unsolvable. We conduct our talks under the wary eyes of politicians, business leaders and workers in both of our countries.

We both face challenges of domestic protectionism and questions about the merits of trade and globalization. There is a growing skepticism in each country about the others' intentions. Unfortunately, in America this is manifesting itself as anti-China sentiment as China becomes a symbol of the real and imagined downside of global competition. That argument is fueled by the evidence of persistent trade and financial imbalances. China has its own opposition, with its own set of arguments. The purpose of this on-going dialogue is to have candid discussions and find ways to ease, rather than increase, these tensions.

The only reason the US doesn't have riots whenever world leaders meet is due entirely to the fact that our police state will kill anyone who dares to show up and make any racket. Just this month, the Democrats once again betrayed the workers voting for them by extending 'free trade.' The insanity of all this is obvious. Our trade statistics have stunk since 1970 and they stink worse and worse and all the trade remedies set up by the financiers and leaders makes this worse and worse and blaming China is stupid since they didn't even begin to import anything into our nation until very recently.

Treasury again:

A look back demonstrates, of course, that increasing our ties has benefited both our people. China's presence in the global economy has raised living standards in China and fueled growth around the world. Ten years ago, China was an outsider in the global marketplace; other countries set the rules and China was expected to abide by them. Now, China is a member of the WTO, a dynamic economic force and a model for other developing countries. China is able to help lead and define the rules. Neither America nor China can shrink from the role we have carved for ourselves in the world. We both must exercise leadership, in positive and productive ways. I have no doubt that our proud, strong countries can fulfill this responsibility.

The United States is supportive of a stable and prosperous China. We are not afraid of the competition. We welcome it, because competition makes us stronger. It is therefore in our interest to support China's continuing efforts to open its economy. As I have said before, our policy disagreements are not about the direction of change, but about the pace of change. Americans have many virtues ---we are a hard-working, innovative people---but we are also impatient. Even the notion of a "dialogue" may seem too passive for America's action-oriented ethic. It is up to us, over these two days and in the work that follows, to show that words are precursors to action.

The SED allows us to look forward, together, and define our future bilateral economic relationship. We are creating a roadmap for the future. So, welcome again, Madame Wu, distinguished Ministers and colleagues. Let's get to work.

China can clearly see 'competition' with Asia is weakening the US. They track this deteriorating situation closely. The plan is for them to assist us in this trajectory that we set up way back in 1970. When they first began to figure out this business we have trapped ourselves in, it was partially due to myself for I was raging about this back in the mid-1980's. While the Chinese trade officials living with me watched open-mouthed.

Since then, they have applied themselves to working out what is going on and how the Japanese and Germans won WWII after 30 years of trade with the US. They now understand the underpinnings of this new international world order and intend to be the masters of it and I can't blame them: I would do the same thing if I were them!

HAHAHA. I know Asian powers read my blog. As well as people in our own government. Hello! I broke the news that Japan was selling off US bonds to CHINA and they were not supporting the dollar at all, CHINA was doing this! Well, the Japanese rushed out and bought American bonds. Oopsie. Their latest trick has been uncovered. I do hope our own government's negotiators figured this out. They should read this blog more often. Japan's perfidy here is obvious. The system is so rigged at this point thanks to their use of the .5% interest scheme, they didn't need to buy and hide our bonds to keep the dollar stronger than the yen!

But their sales of our bonds weakened the dollar compared to all other currencies including the yuan. And now they have been bested by the Chinese who have a stronger currency than the yen AND the dollar even as both the yen and dollar fall! So Japan has to make the dollar stronger versus the YUAN and this three-way game will continue to roil the currency markets and lots of hedge funds using derivatives will get very rich while this destructive game continues.

The T-Bomb detonated on June 23, 1997 at Columbia University by Japan's Prime Minster, Ryutaro Hashimoto, has motivated me to 'rehash' a series I started many months ago - when conventional wisdom felt it was an absurd idea to think the Land of the Rising Sun would dare unload it burgeoning burden of U.S. T-Bonds, INDEED even contemplate the 'ridiculous' notion. However, Mr. Hashimoto has dispelled all these naive and credulous opinions, when he publicly and candidly confessed:

"I hope the U.S. will engage in efforts and in cooperation to maintain exchange stability so we will not succumb to the temptation to sell off Treasury bills and switch our funds to gold,..."

"We were tempted to sell off... It is true we have not really made the advantageous choice."

"I believe the U.S. economy has the strength to absorb (a bond sell off) "but the effects could be enormous. ... It is because ... countries are holding onto the T-bills that the U.S. economy is being maintained."

"I hope the United States may engage in efforts to maintain exchange stability."

Right before that speech filled with dire warnings and I would say, great arrogance, the yen was very strong, nearly 100 to the dollar. Right after that speech, all of Asia had a terrible currency collapse and the yen happily floated downwards along with all the ruined economies in Asia. Just as they wished.

Another thing began, very slowly in 1999 and then picking up speed: the value of gold began to climb rapidly. It's climb seems to have paused right now as everyone waits to see how this latest merry-go-round currency game is played by China. Yesterday, China made good on last week's pledge that they would cease buying our bonds and begin to use their massive inflow of dollars to return in the form of hedge fund purchases of American companies. OUCH. The pretense of our media is, this is good news for we will then take over China's finances. Talk about stupid.

China is taking over OUR finances! Hence, the Japanese fear and the sudden rush to buy our bonds after selling them to the Chinese for nearly a year!

Japan is literally awash in US dollars - which puts it into a very precarious position. One possible solution to their economic dilemma is to carefully sell-off their U.S. Treasuries for conversion into other investment vehicles. Following are the pros and cons of alternative actions. Whatever steps taken by the BOJ, the limiting parameters must ensure: 1) a weak, but stable Yen versus the dollar to protect their export markets; 2) low Yen interest rates to reflate the economy; 3) diversification of BOJ's foreign reserves base

In 1997, Japan couldn't sell off our bonds but by 2005, they could and they did. This chart clearly shows how this shift happened. This data is from our own government's financial reports to Congress! Last year! They knew this information but for some reason, refused to understand the implications of all this. Of course, if we never ran any deficits in the first place, we wouldn't have handed this financial weapon to a bunch of crazed Asians seeking power and domination, right?

First: the USA buys the most bonds it issues. No one else comes even close. Second, if you add up all the bonds sold the last 30 years, it is over $8 trillion and rising fast.

Second: it helps to color things in. When I put the countries that are selling off US bonds in red and the ones buying in green, a pretty nasty picture emerges: our allies who we spend half a trillion protecting every year are SELLING and the countries that harbor some need to control our empire are BUYING. Rapidly. This is a STRATEGIC DISASATER. And we should be seeing hearings about this and there should be demands our allies support our red ink, not make it worse. Certainly, this is a stab in the back.

Right! So always, the blame comes back home to roost. Whenever we beg Japan or China to save us from our own follies, things get worse. We lose face, we lose power, we look stupid and worse, if they DO save us from ourselves like they did in the past, we run off and make things worse by cutting taxes and overspending like crazy.

The only way to stop this attitude problem in our own country is for Asia to hammer us on the economic front. Which they will in due time, just not yet.

From the article about that Hard Place:

The BOJ will have diversified its foreign reserves' base out of its heavy dollar concentration into the most universally accepted hard currency: GOLD.

Japan didn't go off and buy lots of gold back in 1997. That would tip their hand, first of all. Instead, I would propose they helped trigger that nasty currency crisis a few months later. The Japanese discovered that 2.7% interest which was their rate in 1997 when they made that open threat was the key. They used the currency crisis as a cover for dropping rates to the insane amount of 0%. That is unheard of. Governments collapse and economies fail long before one resorts to that! Indeed, the common response to a currency crisis is to RAISE INTEREST RATES which the other nations did but Japan moved in the opposite direction, claiming they alone have a depression. No inflation.

So they did not buy gold and the price of gold stagnated until the US started raising interest rates. Then inflation and gold values took off in tandem.

After Friday's sell-off in Tokyo I feel that the "house of pain" is the appropriate phrase to describe the current situation for Japanese stocks. Among all Japanese stocks with ADRs listed on the NYSE (NYX) or NASDAQ (NDAQ) only two managed to gain, doing so nicely.

There are a number of factors at play putting downward pressure on Japanese stocks. The biggest issue right now has to be the strong yen which I last saw at Y109.5/US$1. After the big sell-off overnight in Tokyo that sent the Nikkei 225 Stock Average down -1.54% and as much as -2.61% intra-day, the exchange rate is about the only place foreign investors in Japan can find solace (that is unless your short Japan).

In the last 10 years Japan has soaked up over half a trillion in US bonds. They did this in order to make the dollar much stronger. And to keep American dollars out of circulation, they hoarded them until it got to a trillion then they began to drop some of this loot in 2006. Oops. The dollar weakened against the yen.

Thanks to China, Japan no longer can single-handedly manipulate our currency at will. They lost control of the puppet's strings. China's hoard of US bonds is nearly as big as Japan's stash. On top of this, the Chinese did this while running a trade surplus with not only the US but significantly, WITH JAPAN! The world's #1 and #2 economies have played the weak currency game too well. They both ended up open for Chinese exploitation. Congratulations, Hu and Wen and the Chinese communist cadres. Gads. Fine students.

One problem Japan is facing now is the yen is cut off from all other things including their stock markets so the yen isn't wrecking them but it is definitely weakening their own stock market. So China and the US see their stocks rise while Japan's stock holders are the motley fools who are mighty big dupes here. Want to buy on the Nikkei? HAHAHA.

How long will Japan feed all that American loot into China's stock markets? Will their starvation diet for Japanese workers turn into famine for Japanese investors? You bet.

Data compiled by the US CFTC shows a 56% contraction in the short positions in Japanese yen for large speculators between February 13, 2007 (when short positions hit a new record high) to a March 6, 2007 low. This was the source of a JPY6.83 reversal in the yen.

However, the capital flowing out of Japan last week to the tune of JPY 1,117.8 billion, compared to a JPY1,112.7 billion inflow in the week prior to the sell-off, helped to limit the yen’s sharp swing and means Japanese investors are still strongly disposed to buying higher yielding overseas assets, which will continue to exert downward pressure on the yen.

Problem #2 with a weak currency: money that should stay home, leaves. And as I pointed out, Japanese investors are being looted just as much as Japanese workers and savers. If the government of Japan thinks starving the Japanese in order to over-feed Toyota, Sony and Nintendo, they will end up all the poorer and with a bunch of hedge funds filled up with Chinese dollars, buying out all the stocks of any functional Japanese company.

Even by the buttoned-up standards of central bankers, Alan Greenspan is not an effusive man. But one economic phenomenon has driven the U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman to reach for the superlatives: in March, he marveled at the "extraordinary" efforts of China and Japan to prop up the dollar by pumping money into U.S. bonds. Japan's accumulation of U.S. securities, he declared, was "awesome." Indeed, in the first three months of this year, China and Hong Kong bought $167 billion of American securities (primarily U.S. treasuries and corporate bonds), while Japan bought $336 billion worth, according to the Asian Development Bank. Greenspan isn't the only one doing a double take. Last week Bill Gross, America's most influential bond investor, warned that the dollar could plunge by 20% if China and Japan stop supporting it by buying U.S. bonds. "Japan and China will change their stance," Gross told the Financial Times. "We don't know when, but we know they will." By investing in American assets on such a massive scale, Japan and China have undertaken one of the biggest financial experiments in history. Why on earth are they doing it, and how worried should we be?
*snip*
Already, Asia's willingness to bankroll America's debts may be starting to wane. David Wyss, chief economist at ratings agency Standard & Poor's, says anecdotal evidence from bond traders suggests that China's purchases of American securities are slowing. Japan's appetite for U.S. bonds might also begin to ease, if its own economy continues to recover, making domestic investments more attractive than buying American debt. If China and Japan lose their hunger for American assets, the dollar will slide. The question is: how far and how fast? A gradual drop would boost U.S. exports, cut its trade deficit, and help silence protectionist American politicians who demand that trade barriers be raised against Asian countries. But a free fall in the dollar would trigger panic throughout the world's financial system�and remind America's protectionists of the startling new truth of international economics: that the billions of dollars that Asian bankers have parked on Wall Street are now as crucial to America's financial security as America's military power may be to Asia's political security.

And this is why we must arrest Greenspan and hang him in front of the Treasury or the Reserve's headquarters in DC. Mount his head! What insanity!!! He marvels at how China and Japan are manipulating our currency! I didn't find this 'awesome' at the time, I thought this meant we lost control of our own money. Well, we did deserve this! The Reserves saved no reserves and our printing presses were roaring ahead like mad and the US government was overspending and interest rates were near 1% thanks to Greenspan and this launched all those bubbles we see busting all over the place today.

How can anyone admire Greenspan? Ech. And we now can see the dying dollar isn't working for us, it is making our trade deficit much worse. Raise the cost of Chinese goods means they charge us more and our trade deficit with them gets worse. Drop the value of the dollar while importing tons of oil means our trade deficit with Canada and Mexico gets much worse. The only way to cut back is to literally cut back. I would suggest we do it with the oil first.

This Dollar System is the real source of a global inflation which we have witnessed in Europe and worldwide since 1971. In the years between 1945 and 1965, total supply of dollars grew a total of only some 55%. Those were the golden years of low inflation and stable growth. After Nixon's break with gold, dollars expanded by more than 2,000% between 1970 and 2001!

The dollar is still the only global reserve currency. This means other central banks must hold dollars as reserve to guarantee against currency crises, to back their export trade, to finance oil imports and such. Today, some 67% of all central bank reserves are dollars. Gold is but a tiny share now, and Euros only about 15%. Until creation of the Euro, there was not even a theoretical rival to the dollar reserve currency role.

What is little understood, is how the role of US trade deficits and the Dollar System are connected. The United States has followed a deliberate policy of trade deficits and budget deficits for most of the past two decades, so-called benign neglect, in effect, to lock the rest of the world into dependence on a US money system. So long as the world accepts US dollars as money value, the US enjoys unique advantage as the sole printer of those dollars. The trick is to get the world to accept. The history of the past 30 years is about how this was done, using WTO, IMF, World Bank and George Soros to name a few.

This wasn't benign neglect, this was our collective criminal intent to flood the world with dollars and then dare them to send it back home. They paused for only a short while before figuring out they could flood this increasingly valueless currency back here in the form of IOUs and the Japanese went one step further and charged themselves 0% interest so they could flood us with money and have prime differentials even if we dared to drop our interest rates to 1%! Now we are being forced to rapidly raise rates while the Japanese sit on their near zero rates like a hen on a golden egg.

Only the Chinese fox will take the egg and probably kill the hen, too.

Years ago, I wrote a prescient article called 'Boing Boing Boeing' and it was all about the attempts by the Chinese communists to force the US which used Boeing sales to counterbalance the trade imbalances with China, the plan of the Chinese was to force Boeing to relocate most of the work in China because China would go to Airbus if they didn't hand over the factories. Well, starting this week, the newest Boeing jets will all be manufactured in...CHINA and 'assembled' here just like Toyotas. The Dragon wins another round.

Instead of hundreds of panels of aluminum, the 787's major components are being built mostly or entirely of carbon-fiber composite materials that are essentially baked in giant pressure cookers, flown in from faraway factories, then fastened together.

In the past, workers at Boeing plants have stuffed the electrical wiring, hydraulic systems and other innards into planes as they got assembled here, but with the 787, suppliers scattered all over the globe are doing that work.

"Basically ... we're snapping it together," said Tom Wroblewski, president of the union representing Boeing production workers in the Seattle area. "This is a whole new way of assembling an aircraft."

Scattered all over the globe where people speak Chinese. I love how Boeing hides the fact that they no longer make the important parts of these jets! There are a trillion harsh economic, political and diplomatic matters in this news. Basically, we already lost WWIII. We can't build ships and soon we will be unable to build simple transport jets too. And this is part of the long range Chinese plans. I remember very clearly, they discussed how they could tease out of the USA, the manufacturing of jets! 20 years ago.

From the AP article:

Boeing hasn't said how much money it has saved by having suppliers take on various development costs, but industry analyst Scott Hamilton said it's bound to be substantial.

"That kind of risk-sharing, which in the aggregate runs in the billions of dollars, is money that Boeing doesn't have to front," he said.

Once production hits full speed, it will take roughly 700 to 800 machinists to run the 787's final assembly line, Bair said. That's substantially less than the work force needed for Boeing's other jets, though Connie Kelliher, spokeswoman for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751, said she couldn't offer a hard number as a comparison because the company doesn't break out employee totals by production line.

Instead of Americans toiling on building these machines, Chinese will do it. Cheaper. And this was inevitable. When Hu visted the US last year, he first went to visit the Boeing executives to offer them a deal they could not refuse. Either they play it his way or they will lose the biggest jet purchase contracts on earth. Quietly, Boeing's executives signed on board and why not? This is making them much, much richer.

The Chinese leaders know that if they didn't enrich the bosses, owners and other dying capitalists, these people would fight off Chinese penetration of their production methods and markets! So a feather bed of easy money was offered to these clowns who signed away our national security and wealth.

From the same article:

Boeing has said the outsourcing was crucial to keeping development and production costs low enough to make the 787 a good enough bargain that airlines would buy it.

Keep costs going to American workers LOW!!! Ha! No matter how far the dollar drops as a currency, China will always undersell the US workers. They have a huge population that is well-educated, easy to marshal for industrial use and eager to work. We keep forgetting that China has one of the oldest and most sophisticated imperial cultures, one that pratically invented government bureaucracies and certainly, paper money.

This is not some stone-age society suddenly in 'civilization': they are one of the great homelands of great cultures, great civilizations! Misunderstanding this is key to American weakness which the Chinese cheerfully exploit.

Now that they have their dragon paws on the technology, methodology and systems for making the innards and vital cores of our jets, they have the whole thing. Since our people are merely popping the parts together, they will forget how to make or use these processes while the Chinese will not only know all this and use this but will take over designing newer and better systems! So their technology and culture will rise and ours will turn into third world status. We will be the ones amazed at the sight of things. 'How do they do that?' we will stupidly ask.

GADS. Can't anyone see the obvious future? I rail about this a lot but look! Every blasted thing the leadership told me back in the mid-1980's is coming true, one after the other. Taking over Boeing was one of these important things they intended to grab and they have.

Boeing, which this year won orders from Chinese airlines for 60 of its new 787 Dreamliner jets, said in June that it would use about $600 million in parts from Chinese companies.

The Bush Administration is still debating the details of the new regulations, and an intense lobbying campaign is being waged to influence the outcome, Bloomberg report

The ultimate plan is to get Boeing into a large enough contract and then wait a while and then make a nifty deal: they transfer the factories wholesale to China and get the planes cheap and can keep the profits of this contract while it is finished by Chinese workers. This has to be introduced very slyly, at least, they hope.

I have chatted about this plan before. It is very obvious now. Note this article:

Seeing the future isn't very hard if one has wide open eyes and the help of creatures that are a form of psychic vultures that are attracted to dead things.

And one dead thing in our future is our economy! The Chinese are not stupid. This should be tattooed on every trade negotiator's palms. The Chinese are playing a dangerous game and are winning. The plan is to get our final, most developed industries into China and one of the key industries is....Boeing.

China's spending on factories and real estate grew 25.5 percent in the first four months of the year from a year earlier, a government report showed today, beating the 25.3 percent median estimate of 19 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

``It was strong growth and may support the case for the central bank to keep raising interest rates,'' which will hurt bonds, said Li Huiyong, an economist at Shenyin Wanguo Research and Consulting Co. in Shanghai.

In the US we just went through a gigantic building boom. And how many Boeing factories did we build? None? Har. We spent the money on decorating and building zillions of suburban houses, that's what we did. And this is why we will live many years, filled with regrets. We acted like aristocrats who built palaces and hunting lodges only to lose to anyone who practiced capitalism, building businesses and factories and to this day, the fundamental basis of all capitalist cultures still is the spending of money on factories that add value to raw materials.

Maybe some day the Chinese will teach us all this interesting stuff. Starting with Karl Marx. Labor is wealth.

Congress continues to slit our collective throats. The just have to have more 'free trade'. Anyone looking at the statistics can see as plain as day. More free trade=more trade deficits. Since free trade has not only not cured our trade deficit with the world, why are we going over and over to that same poisoned well? Meanwhile, China, flush with American red ink, is running wild, it is now a total gold rush. And few Chinese are saving money in bank accounts (neither are the Japanese, by the way). Time to rethink everything, I would suspect.

As the capital's attention fixed on congressional maneuvering over Iraq war spending, a different drama was playing out in the offices of leading House members - one that would determine the nation's free trade path at a critical juncture.

The question: Would Democrats - much of their party wary of free trade agreements and, more generally, the costs of globalization - sign off on a deal with Republicans that would pave the way for key free trade pacts to move forward?

After a months-long dance, the answer emerged as "yes" Thursday night, thanks to a handful of men, and one woman, determined to move past the poisonous atmosphere that still stews between the two parties.

Indeed. The reason this bill was passed under cover of all the hoo-haw about funding our continuing defeat in Iraq was because this is the best time to slip a knife in our ribs. Naturally, all magicians like to use the distraction tool. 'Watch my hands,' they say as they move something with their feet. For weeks and weeks, the reporters and the media owners worked hard with the Democrats to insure few people would notice the negotiations on this bill. The unions noticed but they have been defanged. Even if they get 100 Democrats to back them, they won't get the leadership.

And every time 'free trade' raises its dragon's head, enough Democrats run off to the Republicans and this includes Democratic Presidents, they always use just enough Democrats to pass free trade. In the Cloak Room, the leaders count heads and insure just enough, by one vote, is available. They let off the hook the members representing states with lots of union votes. So over and over, the unions are betrayed but not by all the Democrats.

But they are. For you see, it is possible to fight this by blowing the whistle. Yelling and screaming, running onto the floor and throwing oneself upon it, tearing the hair. Yes. Throwing a huge snit and naming names. Break up these two parties. Both are working for the ruling elites, the people with money who make money by deliberately running everything in the red. This is....TREASON.

People screwing up this way in Japan or China would be either bumped into by the Yakuza and shot or taken to a rehabilitation camp on the border of Outer Mongolia and given a shovel to dig his own grave.

From the article above:

While a couple dozen Democratic House members are free-trade advocates, the majority are far more skeptical - a sentiment fed by labor leaders closely aligned with the party. Last year's congressional races showcased growing public concern about the costs of globalization, and Americans increasingly equate open trading borders with U.S. job losses.

Even for Rangel, who stood ready to make a deal, the negotiations with his party colleagues proved delicate - with labor leaders objecting at key moments. Rangel now predicts he can pull "more than 100" Democratic votes to his side, more than enough when combined with Republican votes to move important trade accords forward.

Rangel is from NYC. And NYC loves free trade. The great ports love and need it. I once worked for a German corporation in Manhattan, my husband worked in shipping and this meant all his bosses were foreigners who all gave heavily to NYC politicians and this means mostly Democrats.

The betrayal of the working class by either party is a long, ugly history. The one thing both parties fear is a Socialist party of any sort. To this day, despite all the data showing that all industrial countries like Canada or Germany that have national health insurance are better than our own nation's insurance, thanks to both parties betraying the people, we get nothing of the sort here. It is the same deal: the guys making money don't want any socialism that stops the money stream so they buy the politicians.

Years ago, around 1950, if the unions could have formed a party and then let the Dems or Repubs jockey for favor, the death of the unions and the loss of worker power would possibly not have happened. But the entire 'Red Scare' which peaked in 1925 and in 1950, both five years after a World War, we now see unions toothless and helpless, they let propaganda intended to cut their own balls off flow freely over the nation. They became more anti-socialist than the fascist capitalists.

They thought they would be richly rewarded for this. Instead, they were enslaved. I hope all other workers of the world look really carefully at this and learn. And of course, the stupidity of destroying the unions, making workers poorer and letting capitalists do their worst is obvious. Our trade deficit this year is the biggest in history, over $800 billion. Astonishing. Fatal. STUPID. It will be worse next year.

China's money supply growth exceeded the government target for a third month and lending accelerated, adding pressure on the central bank to raise interest rates.

M2, which includes cash and all deposits, rose 17.1 percent in April from a year earlier, the People's Bank of China said on its Web site today, after gaining 17.3 percent in March. That beat the 17 percent median estimate of 19 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and the central bank's 2007 target of 16 percent.

Outstanding yuan loans also rose more quickly last month than in March as tighter lending rules and higher borrowing costs failed to curb investments in factories and real estate. The People's Bank of China has raised interest rates three times since April 2006, as well as increasing the amount lenders must set aside as reserves seven times, in a bid to slow asset bubbles and accelerating inflation.

The flood of money flowing into Japan is reentering the financial dark pools and bloating our stock market and the value of the euro. The flood of trade flowing from China to the US, over $200 billion a year, is causing financial chaos in China. Obviously, the Chinese workers are trying to get as rich as fast as possible and this is an explosive situation. The open doors in the Golden West is causing all that gold to flow into China.

More than 70 billion yuan (9.1 billion U.S. dollars) was transferred from savings accounts in Shanghai to stock trading accounts in the first four months of this year, the Shanghai branch of the People's Bank of China estimated on Saturday.

"Given the continuous bullish stock market, the diversion of savings deposits will persist for a good while yet," said an official with the Shanghai branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

The numbers are very astonishing. The US workers are banking very little, certainly as a whole, even with the 401k plans and other schemes, the debt side of the ledger is overwhelming. As soon as any asset value rises on properties, it is tapped. Even today when it is obviously false, people pretend that this tsunami of wealth that is being loaned to us comes from workers in Asia saving yen and yuan and accepting no interest accrued. This stupid lie is a baby bedtime story to keep Americans from questioning what is causing all this.

So this week's negotiations to continue this game, to enlarge this game, to make the red ink flowing like our life blood, worse, should trigger a reaction. Workers should be flooding into DC, yelling. But there is silence. We gave up. Our only hope is for the red ink to flow back here in the form of loans that charge below the rate of inflation.

A new power transmission line designed to send electricity from Wenshan in southwest China to HaGiang in Vietnam has been completed and put into service, reported the Yunnan Power Grid.

It is the fifth power line to transfer electricity from China to Vietnam.

The newly completed line is also the second 220-kilovolt-power line to be constructed between China and Vietnam. The first one runs between Honghe in Yunnan and Lao Cai of Vietnam.

This is NOT free trade. This is China extending its infrastructure and tying in neighbors. We see this here in the US, too. Only the reverse. We are NOT selling energy to neighbors, they, like everyone trading with us, are selling US energy! So the ties are not making our empire stronger, it is yet another gaping wound that is bleeding red ink. Mexico, a poor nation, is selling us oil. Canada, a much wealthier nation, is selling us every possible form of energy including uranium as well as water-generated energy and even bio-fuels.

This is making Canada richer and stronger and the US weaker and poorer.

Concerns have also been rife about Japan's falling birth rate. Earlier this month, the government said that Japan's child population has fallen to a record low since the end of World War II.
To encourage more couples to have children, Abe's government has adopted plans for increasing child care, promoting gender equality and encouraging companies to allow staff more time for family responsibilities.

But many opt to have few or no children because of the high cost of raising children and the persisting social expectations for women to quit their jobs after giving birth.

Earlier this year, the education reform panel recommended that Japanese schools need to step up their measures to crack down on bullying and should rethink a decades-old ban on physical punishment for students who repeatedly ignore the rules.

I thought I would throw this in. Japan's inflation is as terrible as everyone else. But they have novel ways of fixing it and note that one thing they are using is, eliminating the cost of having children by not having children. The US tried to hide the deterioration of the working class by having all the mothers work. This allowed families to feel as if they were not losing gound but they are and only the underclass is having many children.

The other tool is to have everyone work to death on top of not having children. This fabulous idea runs in tandem with the idea that science will remove the need for most humans anyway so the robots will be nice slaves for the rulers who will sit on a pile of gold and this is a great long-range plan to depopulate the earth so the rulers can enjoy the Empire without troublesome peasants.